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Are there too many obvious environmental impact reports being written?

The question arises after reading a study out of Oregon State University, which points out that — get ready — having children increases your carbon footprint.

The study, led by Paul Murtaugh, an OSU professor of statistics, shows that an additional child has an environmental impact more than 20 times greater than any other environmentally friendly behavior an individual might do over a lifetime. From the OSU press release:

“When an individual produces a child – and that child potentially produces more descendants in the future – the effect on the environment can be many times the impact produced by a person during their lifetime.”

In other words: people have an effect on the environment, and more people have more of an effect. Not exactly an earth-shattering discovery.

The Federal “cash for clunkers” program has been front-page news this week. Car dealers are elated, as sales are clearly up as a result of the program. The program is so popular it quickly spent the initial $1 billion that was allotted for rebates. And by Friday, the Senate might approve an additional $2 billion to keep it going.

The program is being touted as having both economic and environmental benefits. While it is clear that the program has spurred car sales, it falls short on its green credentials.

Documenting the environmental impact of your organization in a rigorous way can be pretty daunting. If you’re like me, you sat down to do it for the first time with a full cup of coffee and the best of intentions and and you quickly got discouraged. What should the scope of my emissions boundary be? Wait, what is a scope? Which emissions factor will I use? What’s an emissions factor again? Will we include employee commuting or just business travel? You’re telling me I have to weigh my paper now? I think it’s time for lunch…

Now you don’t have to go it alone! There are people to teach the guidelines to you!

In 2008, according to its website, Safety-Kleen collected more than 225 million gallons of used oil. In the same year, Safety-Kleen recycled approximately 145 million of it into base oil products for re-use in the marketplace.

This morning, Safety-Kleen announced a partnership with a Massachusetts-based service center to exclusively feature their “green” oil in all its oil changes. “By choosing EcoPower for their next oil change, South Shore residents are helping to reduce greenhouse gases that affect global warming,” said Chris Lucchetti, owner of Lucchetti’s, said in a press release. “We like to say, ‘Change the Planet. Just Change Your Oil.'”

Decades of attempts at making bikes free and easy to share in urban settings—such as in The Netherlands; Portland, Oregon; Madison, Wisconsin—indicated that there’s no such thing as a free bike. Most of the steeds were eventually stolen or strewn into canals or otherwise rendered useless. But forcing riders to pony up a deposit and/or pay a fee for using a bike beyond a set amount of time (say, a half hour) has led to some success in places such as Lyon, France, where the Velo’v system introduced a means for using smart cards and specialized bikes and locking racks to combine convenience with security.

In Paris, the two-year-old Velib system boasts an astounding 20,600 bicycles, which are stored at more than 1,450 stations and checked in and out using a payment and smart card system similar to the one designed by Velo’v.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the overlap between NASCAR fans and environmentalists is not large. But now they’ve got at least one shared topic of conversation:

Pennsylvania’s Pocono Raceway, which hosts two NASCAR events each year, plans to build a three megawatt solar power plant to provide the track with electricity.

At three megawatts, it would be the world’s biggest solar energy project at a sports facility, and Pennsylvania’s largest to date (at least two other 3 mW farms in PA are in earlier stages of development).

When I read the account of Alan During’s struggle to curb junk mail delivery to his residence, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud; is there anyone who can’t relate? For a solid year, Alan not only kept all the junk mail he received; he also chronicled the amount and type of mail delivered (i.e. 15 pounds worth of phone books!) before attempting to get off the mailers’ lists. His experiment has me wondering: how will sustainability influence marketing in the quickly evolving green business world?

Leigh Stringer is a converted “greeniac” who not that long ago didn’t think much about the idea of “being green.” It’s not that she necessarily had anything against it, she literally didn’t think that much about it.

“My husband drug me to see Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth,” says Stringer, and the rest, as they say, is history. She’s now an avowed greeniac (Stringer has formulated four levels of one’s, for lack of a better term, “greenness” 1) Greeniac 2) “Bottom line” environmentalism 3) Couch potato greenies, and 4) well, if you’re at this level, you’re not really so green, now are you?).

A trained architect with an MBA, Stringer is now a VP for Advanced Strategies, with HOK, a global architectural and sustainable design firm HOK, itself recently voted the “greenest design firm in the world.”

Stringer’s work at HOK’s Advanced Strategies involves consulting with clients in the initial stages of workplace and building design and help them make the best decisions for designing a workplace that best supports their mission and employees. More often than not clients want to incorporate sustainability and “green” in their plan, but are also just as often unsure of how best to go about it. Stringer found that often good intentions, while a good start, didn’t always lead to a sustained, comprehensive, and workable plan.

By so many measures, Ricoh, the Japanese office equipment-maker, is a leader in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). You can spend several hours on the Ricoh website reading about their numerous CSR initiatives, their environmentally friendly products and processes, as well as the many awards they have won over the past 20 years. The company places corporate citizenship at the core of their mission and makes the effort to integrate these core values through every part of their business. Well done.

But good intentions don’t always make for good results. The UK website BusinessGreen.com is reporting on one Ricoh CSR program that has seemed to miss its mark, raising the questions: how do you decide which CSR initiatives are most appropriate for your business, how do you monitor the programs, how do you measure their effectiveness, and are good intentions enough?

There was a time when embracing sustainability or “green” initiatives meant sacrificing the bottom line in an effort to “do the right thing.” Clearly this is no longer the case. In fact, as we’ve seen with solar and wind companies, organic retailers and eco-friendlier vehicle manufacturers, embracing eco-sensibilities has proven to be a recipe for success. This has certainly been the case for major automakers.

Although no major automaker has walked away from this economic downturn unscathed, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see which car manufacturers have struggled the most.

It is time to rethink the language we use to describe efforts to improve our relationship with the environment. Below are the four reasons I believe we have entered a Post-Green, Post-Sustainability Era, and need a new meme:

Red or Black Only A price on carbon – whether in the US through ACES or internationally through COP15 – means that the discussion by businesses about “going green” becomes no longer exceptional (“hey, look what we did”), it becomes merely a requirement. Sustainability moves from the realm of marketing to the realm of bean counting and execution. Compliance to a regulatory framework for emissions means carbon is either a business asset or a liability, both of which impact the bottom line. Result: “Green” is folded into what business has historically been about – finishing the year in the Red or in the Black (and hedging against future shifts in the new currency of carbon). Similarly, strict compliance guidelines such as RoHS and WEEE also mean that making products more recyclable or less toxic is also taken out of the realm of marketing.

To help you calculate exactly how many trees are used to make the paper for your latest office report, the Environmental Defense Fund has created a paper calculator on its website. Although it’s a great tool, it expects the user to know how many pounds of paper are used. This is a more difficult task than you might think: Most people don’t know how much their office paper actually weighs. What most people do know is the number of sheets of paper in a given case, how many cases they go through, and a number on the side measured in “pounds” – typically indicated on the paper’s wrapping or invoice. Despite being called “pounds,” this number does not directly indicate how much that paper actually weighs, rather it distinguishes the quality of the paper stock itself. Business cards typically use 80 lb. paper stock while office paper is typically 20 lbs. So, if we do not know how much the paper actually weighs, how can we accurately calculate its footprint?

Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE) has joined the increasing number of corporations committing to minimizing their environmental impact. The soft drink giant has, “pledged to reduce its carbon footprint by 15 percent by the year 2020. ” The move will, CCE expects, allow it to improve its corporate responsibility and sustainability (CRS) while lowering its net emissions to 5.2 metric tons.

“The Commitment 2020″ outlines strategies the company will adopt to improve five CRS focus areas. It will improve its: energy consumption and climate change impact (as mentioned, by trimming its carbon footprint by 15 percent); water usage (by establishing water-sustainable operations [i.e. using less water, neutralizing impact on local communities]); packaging-related damage (by reducing the impact of its packaging [i.e. maximizing use of renewable, reusable, and recyclable materials, with the goal of recovering the equivalent of 100 percent of its packaging]); product quality (by providing beverages for a range of lifestyles [and increasing consumers’ ability to make informed beverage selections]); and cultural inclusivity (by creating a culture that values diversity).

The government’s “Cash for Clunkers” program – which offers compensation for older automobiles swapped out for newer ones – has been more than successful. Apparently, Americans have swapped out so many clunkers that the government is scrambling to obtain more funding. Today the House approved a bill allotting another $2 million to fund the program; the proposal will run through September 30, 2010, and will draw from an Energy Department loan. The bill awaits approval by the Senate.

“Cash for Clunkers” provides up to $4,500 in rebates for consumers who trade in aging automobiles for newer, more fuel-efficient ones. The government launched the program in June, with an initial $1 billion, in order to jump-start the auto industry. According to unofficial estimates, consumers have already sold close to 250,000 vehicles to the program, quickly exhausting available funds. For the struggling auto industry, the program has, apparently, provided a viable, national stimulus. Analysts reportedly believe that, if the program continues, it will boost U.S. auto sales to a record high (for this year) of more than 10 million units for 2009.

Legislators are not in agreement over the funds; some oppose using Energy Department funds for the auto industry, while the White House supports the program.

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